MONTHLY WEB SEMINAR SERIES
Second and Fourth Fridays, 11:00 am EST
(Register today for one or all events)

Or, view recordings of past events.

This free Web seminar series has been specifically created to meet the needs of the developer and end-user communities. Hosted by product experts, the presentations will include programming tips and techniques, general product information, and demonstrations. Presentations will vary in length from 40 minutes to one hour depending upon the topic.

Following each presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions or provide feedback via live, online chat sessions with the presenters and other participants. (Note: You must be a registered member of Focal Point to attend the chat sessions.)

Each session will be recorded and available on the Information Builders Developer Center. Just select the On-Demand Seminars and Tutorials link under the "Learn More" section, or review some of the customer reviews for each recorded event at the bottom of this post.

New! Something for Something
Congratulations to the following winners of the new “Bonus” option for completing and submitting your evaluation forms for the Office Series presentation!

*Becky Kahlsorf, Qwest
*Kathy Tharp, University of Kentucky
*Bob Alexander, University of Kentucky
*Paul Lane, Verizon Business
*Susie Keehner, Henny Penny Corporation
*Melissa McLawhon, PCMH

Your Focal Point t-shirts are on their way!

UPCOMING SESSIONS
September 8
WebFOCUS Maintain - Come See What You're Missing
This presentation will give an overview of the Maintain product/features and show some current Maintain production applications. It will demonstrate Rapid Application Development with Closed Loop abilities as well as application development using the Maintain Development Environment.
Presented by Mark Derwin, Information Builders Senior Manager of Maintain Support

September 22
WebFOCUS Visual Discovery
Learn how to turn any data into intuitive, illustrative enterprise reports for your end users to conduct analysis. During this presentation you'll learn the benefits to organizing data and reporting it graphically or textually: scatter plots, pie charts, multiple bar charts, histograms, data constellations, and line charts.
Presented by Paulo Tavares, Information Builders Systems Architect

RECORDED SESSIONS
Fundamentals of Web-based Authentication
During this session, you will learn why HTTP headers and cookies are essential to the operation of most Web-based authentication schemes, including HTML Forms, Basic, and Integrated Windows Authentication. Knowing more about these concepts will help you converse more effectively with systems and security administrators and is invaluable for debugging problems with single sign-on configurations.

Customer Reviews:
- "Excellent job speaker, great content, lots of immediate value and impact"
- "Good high level overview"

Congratulations to the following winners of the new "Bonus" option for completing and submitting your evaluation forms for the Fundamentals of Web-based Authentication presentation!

*Joyce Halford, US Bank
*Gerry Morin, Fidelity
*Ben Davis, Valero
*Kal Kondepati, Target Corporation
*Travis Hettenbach, Koch Mineral Services

Your Focal Point t-shirts are on there way!

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Office Series – Excel, PowerPoint, and Word
In addition to learning more insider’s tips and techniques that WebFOCUS offers users of office products, there will also be a review of enhancements made over the last few releases to WebFOCUS' PDF format - including full breadth of graphic support and advanced layout capabilities. Combine, coordinate and publish your reports in Developer Studio's enriched development environment.

Customer Reviews:
- Available Soon

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SOA and Web Services Essentials
Learn how organizations can eliminate the complexity associated with service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments and leverage existing IT investments to create powerful, reusable business services.

Customer Reviews:
- "Excellent summary at a not too technical approach to defining SOA and web services."
- "Excellent overview of SOA. I learned a few things."

Congratulations to the following winners of the new “Bonus” option for completing and submitting your evaluation forms for the iWay Series SOA presentation!

* John Zeller, Mayo Clinic
* Jeeva Witanachchi, Henry Ford Community College
* Alan Dooley, Anthem
* Jim Petri, Ameritas
* Victor King, Pharmasave Drugs National

Enjoy your Information Builders light-up pens!

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What's New in Developer Studio and SAP
If you participated in the first Focal Point Web seminar, “What’s New in Developer Studio” you’ll want to attend this one. This presentation will specifically address the technical and business benefits regarding Developer Studio and SAP so you can empower your end users to satisfy their own dynamic, ad hoc reporting requirements while reducing the burden on IT. Learn how to:

- Build an SAP BW self-service report template
- Take full control of Hierarchies using new commands such as BY HIEARCHY, WHEN and SHOW
- Use the new tree control object within HTML Layout
- Create an Active Report to help navigate through SAP BW hierarchies
Presented by Richard Sitt, Information Builders Technical Director

Customer Reviews:
- "Thank you for an interesting topic"
- "The presentation was interesting and the speaker engaging."

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iWay Series – EDI
To successfully implement an e-business strategy, companies must be able to support both XML and EDI formats for collaboration. Learn about iWay's EDI solutions including validation and conversion of documents from EDI to XML formats, making it easier than ever to include EDI documents in XML-based integration projects.
Presented by Russell Sherwin, iWay Product Marketing Manager

Customer Reviews:
- "I thought the information and pace of the presentation was great!"
- "Interesting topic. Thank you. Speaker has an obvious sense of humor as well."
- "A very good overview of iWay capabilities and solutions, especially being a WebFOCUS developer. Thanks!"
- "Good, solid presentation...easy to follow and very interesting topic. Will definately suggest to management that they check out the recording."

Congratulations to the following winners of the new “Bonus” option for completing and submitting your evaluation forms for the iWay Series EDI presentation!
* Susie Keehner, Henny Penny Corporation
* Leita Baker, US Bank
* Kimber Combs, Murphy-Brown, LLC
* Leah Cross, University of Nebraska at Omaha
* Tom Thomas, JP MorganChase

Enjoy your Focal Point t-Shirts!

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WebFOCUS Razzle Dazzle Techniques
If you didn’t have an opportunity to attend this popular Summit hands-on lab now is the perfect time. Learn some of the creative ways to enhance reports using WebFOCUS.

Customer Reviews:
- "WOW! That was pretty powerful stuff! Really makes for a great presentation - all that Razzle Dazzle!"
- "The speaker did a thorough presentation. She intrigued the audience to really think outside the box to get the most out of WebFOCUS."
- "Always, one of the best IBI presentations I attended. Still managed to pick up a few more new things from this webcast (even after attending the recent Summing hands-on one. Thanks!"
- "Thank you all for doing all of this; its fun and very community-building."

Congratulations to the following winners of the new “Bonus” option for completing and submitting your evaluation forms for the Razzle Dazzle presentation!
* Carol Bricker, BNSF
* Shelley Jaeck-Iglinski, US Bank
* Sharon Johnson, Target
* Kevin Thierolf, Ameritas
* Joan Williamson-Kelly, Qwest

Enjoy your Focal Point t-Shirts!

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Office Series – Excel, PowerPoint, and Word
Want to know some of the insider’s tips and techniques that WebFOCUS offers users of office products? Learn how easy it is to generate Web queries, PivotTables, macro-driven worksheets, and more during this exciting series.

Customer Reviews:
- "The new features are definately exciting! I really enjoy these sessions and find them extremely valuable. I went to Summit and sat in on Brian's lab but it was still a great refresher."
- "Presentation was very interesting, and speaker did a good job."
- "These forums are an excellent way to communicate. Need to have more of them with regard to BI and IB's roadmap to business performance and BI integration." [Update Thanks for the feedback, let me see what I can get on the schedule!]

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WebFOCUS and Excel Overview
Did you know WebFOCUS eliminates the need to re-key data from paper documents or copying then pasting information into spreadsheets? Or, that clicking embedded hyperlinks in Excel will produce the same drill-downs as those created in WebFOCUS HTML? Learn about the many benefits of WebFOCUS during this overview session.

Customer Reviews:
- "I really liked the 'sensitive to the user' approach. Working backwards from what is useful to the user is very helpful in considering what to build in to what is being developed."
- "I like to have the handouts available for immediate printout (at the BEGINNING of the meeting) so I can jot down notes on the pages to which they apply" [Update - From now on, we'll add the PowerPoint to the morning-of announcment featured on Focal Point. Great suggestion!]
- "simple enough for 1 hour. easy to understand. as an experienced developer, I LIKE to see the actual code but I also understand the tool is being showcased. Looking forward to more."

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What’s New In Developer Studio
Learn about the latest features and enhancements and find out how to:
- Meet users’ offline-analysis requirements with Active Reports
- Shorten time to market for delivering Visual Discovery consoles
- Automatically generate forms with Power Painter

Customer Reviews - What's New in Developer Studio:
- "For a one hour time frame the presentation was adequately balanced between Power Point and demo."
- "Good speed, great content & preparation. A good learning session."
- "The session was very informative, there were so many features to go over, more time would have been nice. Perhaps these new features sessions can be broken into several to properly highlight each feature."
- "A really good start to these sessions. I found the information to be exactly what I wanted (a quick overview of new features). Glad to see the live demo worked perfectly!"

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kristine>,

what a super idea!

Praise from Caesar!

Thank you - the seminars are booked through October already (and they will also be recorded in case you miss any).

I'm always on the lookout for topics of interest and guest, customer presenters. So if anyone has suggestions please share them, or if you see a topic and would like to co-present/make a cameo/share a tip, let me know.

Maryellen

Maryellen - I have benefitted from the webinars and thank you tremendously for facilitating these sessions.

A lot of us folks could use some help on SQL Passthru, especially differences between coding for:

- Oracle
- DB2
- SQL Server

Hi Sandy - Thanks for the kind words regarding this series and the suggestion regarding the SQL Passthru. Just wanted to let you know its on "the list" and I'm working on fulfilling your request!

Cheers!

Maryellen

hearty second to Sandy's suggestion,
and a request for Jim Thorstad's upcoming one.
At Summit, we went to his presentation, and what we failed to get from it was how to take the resultant variable and turn it into a form variable on the launch page. Just displaying it was ... nice...but useless...how do we turn it into a form variable, a parm, that a fex can receive???